If you want driving directions in Europe, and you’re finding that Google Maps doesn’t cut it, try ViaMichelin, which has much better coverage, and much richer directions. My favourite feature:

From the recently-prolific Nokia Beta Labs: Nokia Audiobooks. Cool, but alas only for 3rd edition phones, so not available for my trusty Nokia N70.

The Holy Grail for me back in the days when I was working with the Province of PEI on mapping was coming up with a driving directions application from scratch (those were the days well before Google Maps and MapQuest made such things commonplace).

While we went through several iterations of kludgy MapGuide-based solutions, none of them were ever quick or well-executed enough to be actually useful (I did, however, learn a lot about Dijkstra’s algorithm).

If only I was doing this sort of thing today, when open source mapping has hit prime time, and amazing stuff like this is coming to the fore.

Die Idee, die aus der Kälte kam (“The idea to come in from the cold” says Google). One of my favourite websites. I don’t read German, but my oh my is the photography amazing.

OneMusic Sample Bank: Over 1,000 free music samples for you to use vs. NPR Music: a free, multi-genre, multimedia Web site that presents the best of public radio music.

NPR lets us consume differently. BBC lets us produce differently.

Links from Ewan McIntosh and Rob Paterson.

At the risk of inciting the kind of violence I did 5 years ago, I point out that Daylight Savings Time ended on Sunday morning.

Three years ago, on a trip with my Dad, we found ourselves on a rainy day inside Madig, the only store in Gospic, Croatia. Tucked in behind Hotel Ana (the only hotel in town), the store sold pretty well everything, from hardware to groceries to toys to oil stoves:

We were shopping for umbrellas. And they had a lot of them.

When we tried to purchase something other than a standard black “man’s umbrella” — anything with colour or panache, in other words — we were rebuffed (in Croatian) by the cashiers: the message was clearly that real Croatian men don’t buy girlish umbrellas.

So we went back and picked out a couple of manbrellas:

Obviously I learned nothing from this experience at all, as here’s the umbrella I walked to work with this morning:

This umbrella is compact and keeps the rain off. But it’s not the kind of umbrella a real Croatian man should be carrying around town.

Apache. Running on my iPod. http://ipod.ruk.ca/ (taking the iPod home, so offline for now!). Freaky. And, of necessity, short-lived, so get it while you can.

Update later: Well, 62 of you visited the iPod server test page. Thanks. A couple of things I’d like to explore more:

• I’d like a solution like Nokia’s Mobile Webserver Gateway (aka Raccoon) so that I could make the server available from whatever dynamic IP address on whatever wifi network I happened to be roaming on. The Raccoon solution is drenched in Java and is unapproachable (at least for me), perhaps in part because it has to be concerned with GSM data networks instead of just wifi. I’m wondering whether something simpler might work.
• It would be nice to have more information about the internal data formats of my personal data on the iPod Touch — calendar, contacts, “Now Playing” song, accelerometer action (“I last moved 13 minutes ago”) and so on. I’m sure there’s documentation of this, at least in dribs and drabs, available out there. A web interface to some or all of it would be cool.
• There’s the harder-to-solve problem of the fact that the iPod Touch sucks battery life when wifi is left on all the time. With wifi turned on manually only when I need it, I can get 24-36 hours of battery life; with wifi left on I can be down to nothing in 4 hours.
• This is cool and interesting, at least to me, for the same reasons that Nokia says it is.

All around logistical specialist for Médecins Sans Frontières.